Myself, BobSpence1, TG, and at least half a dozen other posters.

STFU, you know exactly who the 'we' is that I'm referring to.

No.

That's where you clowns get turned on your heads when you start making naked assertions.

No.

I understand what axiomatic truths are. I just don't accept your equivocations as axioms.

You people equivocate. That's the problem. You're sophists.

Saying "The universe began to exist" is a rhetorical tautology. It is not an impartial assessment in deductive reasoning. And certainly not in your usage because you are already biased towards a 'specific' conclusion. This is known as 'Confirmation Bias'.

The next statement followed by your first is usually "Whatever begins to exist, has a cause'. This is another 'Confirmation Bias'. Stating 'a cause'.

No different than stating the universe was 'made', which insinuates a 'maker' of that which is 'made'.

This is atrocious syntax, and completely violates being 'impartial'. You are 'leading' to looking for 'a' (singular) cause, when events that occur are 'systems', and are the 'result' of 'circumstances'.

An example of an impartial assessment is "Diamonds form".

Occam's Razor

I used 1 word to elaborate what I wanted to convey about diamonds 'being the result of a unknown set of circumstances'.

Saying that diamonds 'begin to exist', is being 'poetic'. Not 'analytical'. Saying they were 'caused' is also dissonant, if you are being analytical.

"Diamond formation is the result of blah, blah, blah...." is an analytical narrative.

STFU.

Your 'arguments' for God creating the universe is the equivalent of a 'stork' bringing babies into the world.

Argumentum verbosium.

What a BS word salad to assert that some things are just 'self evident', such as the universe must have had a 'cause', since it is 'exists', and everything that 'exists' has a 'cause', except the 1 thing that doesn't have a 'cause', which 'must' be the 'cause' of all things that 'exist', otherwise they wouldn't 'exist', if they were not 'caused' to 'exist', by a 'cause', which we will now call a 'creator'.

That's essentially what you fucking con artists are trying to 'spin' into something more 'robust' sounding.

It's a fucking circular argument, based on ignorance and incredulity.

A bunch of ignorant navel gazers trying to deconstruct the formation of the entire universe and the formation of biological life, with the same 'philosophies' that has embarassed itself for it's ignorant a priori assumptions, for centuries.

So what?

I don't know the bore and stroke, or firing order of a 351 Cleveland either, but, I can know if someone who owns one has only enough understanding to qualify as ignorant on the topic of internal combustion engines.

They clearly state their 'bases' in their 'arguments'.

And their 'basis' for their 'arguments' are logical fallacies and assumptions.

None of them ever saw how this (or any other) universe was formed, or how biological life (on this planet, or any other) formed. 

They were a bunch of ignorant, arrogant, self professed 'academics' who started, and perpetuated a lot of false assumptions that kept people in the dark about 'reality'.

Till science came along, and illustrated that it's not practical to build a string of assumptions, and think that our odds of making successful predictions is not likely to go down as a result.

You can refuse to admit that you simply 'don't know' how the universe was formed, or how biological life formed. But the fact is 'you don't'.

And no amount of your infantile posturing is going to make you appear any brighter.

You want to convince anyone that you're not biased?

You've failed before you even got started, if you want to imagine that gods exist in the first place.

Your first error is that you assume ONE god.

Where did the 'notion' ever possibly come from that there could one be 1 god? Are you going to try and tell me that 1 god existing is a 'self evident' logical deduction?

Can you tell me why there couldn't be 'many' gods?

I'd love to hear the 'logic' behind that.

Why don't you email William Lane Craig on that one, and get back to us atheists who are 'idiots' on the topic of 'gods'...

I just caught up on this thread and wow... lol.  This guy has some nerve, you have to at least admire that.  His argument has been taken apart and shown to be failing on pretty much every level.  Firstly he claims that Metaphysics (via idealism) is on par with Empiricism in arriving at knowledge.  From here he begs the question with his version of the OA.  Mixes in some ML which Bob has addressed quite eloquently IMHO.

Firstly, in order for anyone to be able to form any Metaphysical constructs such as our Beautiful OA, one must first empirically learn how to communicate in one's language.  As a baby, you SEE things, TOUCH things, TASTE things, HEAR words, and SMELL your own diaper at which point you tell your mom you went poo.  Point is, you arrive at all this fundamental knowledge via empiricism.  Now you have some sort of internal narrative that fuels your imagination, and you come up with different ways to arrange those empirically gained concepts to form some sort of idealistic constructs, and arrive at new knowledge.  But without Empiricism you would have no fucking clue what's going on.  Robbed of your senses it would be a very boring life for you, and if you have any illusion about arriving at complex concepts by pure reason, without experience.... well you're delusional.  

As for my previous objection to your lame semantics game, you have yet to address it.  The same with Bob's objections and TG's paradox examples where Metaphysical predictions fail reality.  

cj, you handled this thread as a lady, my hat is off to you big thumbs up to your show of class. 

Mr. M.  you are showing an interesting mix of intelligence and idiocy, but you also show an immature personality that's FAR outclassed in this forum.  

TG,

to reinforce and restate your comments, while we do not have complete knowledge of this 'world', we have massive evidence that evil exists in it, and not just unavoidable evil, as a 'necessary' tradeoff against some greater evil. This means that even if they assume or 'prove' that some omnipotent being exists in this world, the evidence is pretty much all against that entity being both interested in and benevolently disposed toward us, is simply without a shred of justification. 

IOW, the insurmountable (IMHO) 'Problem of Evil'. It's been around a while, but has never been satisfactorily addressed by the believers.

They make the same logical leap in the Cosmological Argument - even if you concede the premises and conclusion, they both fail to establish anything which identifies the proposed being or 'cause' with God, as assumed or defined.

I think something like Iron Chariots but more point form, and less condescending towards theists.  Not that the tone is undeserved, it's just not going to encourage any theists to take it seriously.

We should pool all our arguments into a database, and organize them.  

A bit off topic here TG, did you get that link I sent you regarding the Cosmological Inflation Debate? 

I have a thread started, I thought it was right up your alley.  

The thread is here http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/29385

I wanted to see what you thought of the article.

Ya, it is only available for Sciam subscribers, but their security is a joke.  Go to the article, and add this ' &page=2 ' at the end of the url. 

It will look like this

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-inflation-summer

then you add 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-inflation-summer&page=2

and that gets you the rest of the article. it gets better than the intro lol.